


Uninked

by phansparent (lestershoweller)



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Anxiety, M/M, Needles, Panic Attacks, Tattoos, body issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 10:44:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5045263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lestershoweller/pseuds/phansparent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan’s boyfriend Phil is covered in tattoos, and he’s starting to think Phil might like it better if he was covered in tattoos too. Too bad he’s afraid of needles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Uninked

At a Muse concert in 2009, when Dan was 18, he noticed the only other person alone in the crowd, an ebony-haired stranger with tattoos scattered along his left arm. Usually Dan wasn’t forward, but he’d broken up with his long-term girlfriend only a few weeks before, and he wasn’t enjoying the music as much alone, so he’d approached him. Up close, Dan could see another tattoo peaking from beneath the collar of the man’s shirt, and Dan made it his goal to discover the shape of that tattoo. He still remembered the beating in his chest when he’d said to Phil, “There’s no one better live.” 

Phil glanced over at him, and Dan feared he would faint, convinced Phil would scoff at someone so uncool and posh-sounding invading his space, but Phil had smiled. “It’s my third time seeing them. My friends don’t understand.”

Fireworks were going off inside Dan’s head. “Maybe you need new friends.”

“Maybe I do,” Phil agreed, winking. Dan almost melted into the ground. 

Two weeks later Dan learned the tattoo on Phil’s collarbone was the Leo constellation, a representation of Phil’s love for space and lions. A year had passed, and Phil’s tattoos still mesmerized him, telling Dan stories about who Phil was, is, and would be. Sometimes when they were laying in bed now, and Phil had already fallen asleep, Dan would memorize the lines inked into Phil’s body, tracing them with his fingers and wishing he had the nerve to do the same to his body. He wanted skin that told stories.

Phil had never said it, but Dan knew Phil hated his bare, uninked skin. Dan knew that all of Phil’s significant other’s before him had been covered in pictures and symbols and words, in colors and in black, and Dan’s skin was empty. It repulsed Dan, but he had sneaked a look at Phil’s dashboard on Tumblr, filled with photographs of barely clothed, inked men and women, exuding beauty. Dan saw the way Phil’s friends glared at him, the twenty-three year old man with the body of a pre-pubescent boy, afraid of the pain of a needle to his skin. He was alien to them, who hadn’t hung around someone uninked since they were eighteen. Dan knew he didn’t belong, and Dan knew Phil knew it too. Dan knew that even if Phil alleged he was only kidding each time he suggested Dan accompany him to the tattoo parlor that Phil made a silent plea for the answer to be yes.

One evening, Phil was invited to a club opening – the kind of punk club that Phil and his friends frequented. Dan suffered through these events with a manufactured smile, counting the other people without tattoos and never making it higher than ten, an overestimate, as he knew many bore ink beneath their clothes. This evening, Dan couldn’t manufacture a smile through a whole night, so he put on one for two minutes when he convinced Phil to go on his own with the excuse that he had a late music lesson with a student. Lying left Dan’s tongue tasting like paper, not entirely disgusting but in poor taste.

Dan pulled open the drawer of his desk, retrieving the sketch he’d had done up by the tattoo artist a week ago. It wouldn’t help him much with Phil’s crowd – it was just some thin black scratches – but Phil had advised working up to the larger stuff. Those stripes of ink would teach him to withstand the buzzing needle, until he was strong enough to face the pain of something down the full length of his arm. Dan contemplated taking a swig of whiskey before leaving their flat but decided the risk of him vomiting in the artist’s chair was too high. He would have to settle for the deep breathing exercises his therapist had failed to teach him.

* * *

 

This time Dan made it into the tattoo parlor before panicking. Speaking to the receptionist, his vision became cramped with flashing dots of pink, filling all the space and darkening to black. His skin burned, sweat forming on his temples. Noises around him became incomprehensible, becoming one buzzing noise to his numbed ears. He sank onto the floor, vision now gone and begged his brain to grant him back his senses.

Two minutes later, his blackened vision unclouded. The receptionist was rubbing gently between his shoulder blades, explaining, “This happens to a lot of our customers. There’s no need to be embarrassed.”

His stomach churned, and he pushed himself lightly off the floor, desperate to get out of this place and back to his bed. Ignoring the worries of the receptionist, he padded out of the parlor and back to his and Phil’s flat. Once inside, Dan flopped onto the bed, pulling the covers over himself, as if to protect himself from the shame he’d experienced. He’d heard those words of the receptionist –  _There’s no need to be embarrassed –_ so many times, other times he’d nearly fainted at crowded sporting events and during school exams. What none of those people realized was that while it was embarrassing enough to faint in front of someone else, the real shame came from within: an everlasting refrain in his brain of, “Why are you so crazy?” There was not much a duvet could do to shield from that burning feeling in his chest, the constant mix of anger and shame. He should have outgrown the fear of needles when he was five years old.

Dan was still facedown on the bed when Phil returned home.

“Dan! You promised to greet me with a kiss when I got home!” Phil joked, entering the bedroom, stretching his necktie outwards to pull it off. “Dan, what’s wrong?” he cried, rushing over to Dan’s motionless figure.

As Phil’s fingers stroked through Dan’s hair, Dan felt tears forming at the corner of his eyes. He squeezed them closed, begging for Phil to believe he had fallen asleep. When Phil returned home tonight, Dan had planned to light candles. He had planned to stop by the bakery on his way home and pick up two slices of the raspberry chocolate cheesecake they both loved. There would have been music playing, and Dan would have kissed Phil at the door. Phil would have asked why tonight was special, and Dan would have removed his shirt to show Phil the bandage on his chest, concealing the set of numbers tattooed across his heart: 19.10.09, the day he and Phil had met. He imagined Phil’s eyes widening looking at the bandage, first wondering if Dan had hurt himself, but a smile creeping over his face after a few moments, realizing that Dan was no longer uninked. He knew Phil would convert to parent mode and begin instructing him on the proper care of new tattoos, advising him to leave the bandage on longer to be careful since it was his first one. Phil would forbid Dan to remove the bandage without his assistance, and he’d wash the area himself, so Dan wouldn’t have to see any of the leftover blood. He’d set an alarm on his phone to remind him to rub ointment on the tattoo. But none of this would ever happen because Dan had failed again at keeping his anxiety under control. He would remain uninked and never be the type of person Phil truly wanted to be with.

Dan counted deep breaths and rhythmically swallowed the salvia building in his throat, but the tears still came. He wasn’t a beautiful crier either. The sobs reverberated through the room. Phil continued to stroke Dan’s hair, asking Dan to turn to look at him, which caused Dan to push his face deeper into the pillow, with a half-hope that he’d suffocate. They stayed like this for a quarter hour, until the liquid in Dan’s eyes had dried.

Dan propped himself up and turned around so he was sitting on the bed. Phil climbed into bed next to him, wrapping his arm around Dan’s waist. With his other hand, he wiped remaining tears from Dan’s reddened cheek. “What happened, Bear?” Phil asked, his voice soothing Dan’s breaths.

Dan buried his face into Phil’s shoulder and shook his head, mortified to admit what had happened. Phil began to stroke Dan’s hair again, thinking the motion would eventually calm Dan enough to speak. Instead, Dan broke away from Phil’s grasp and pulled open the bedside drawer, retracting the tattoo design with the parlor logo at the top. He handed it to Phil.

Phil’s first reaction was to giggle, a reaction he swallowed quickly, as Dan glanced at him with his red, watery eyes for a moment before burying his head back into the pillow. Phil ran a soothing hand down Dan’s spine. “I’m sorry Dan, just the idea that you’d get a tattoo. You barely can manage a flu shot!”

Dan’s silence indicated to Phil that he wasn’t in the mood for jokes. Phil continued to stroke the small of Dan’s back, moving his touch sometimes to Dan’s hair.

“I just wanted to look beautiful for you,” Dan admitted.

Phil moved so his head was nestled beside Dan’s, still in the pillow. Gently, Phil touched a hand to Dan’s cheek, pushing it softly, willing Dan to face him. Once they were looking at each other, Phil grasped the other cheek in his other hand and pressed his lips to Dan’s forehead. “You are the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen.”

Dan tugged away from Phil’s clasp, sitting up in the bed again. “Don’t lie!” He shouted, his voice an octave higher than normal. “Every person you dated before me had tattoos. You’re always reblogging these gorgeous ripped people inked all over. I’ve never heard you say one person without tattoos was attractive!”

Phil smiled at his boyfriend, whose cheeks were flushed, wondering how he could be so unaware of his beauty. “I will say again,” Phil began, “and I will continue to say it until you believe me: You are the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen.”

Dan continued to look unconvinced, crossing his arms across his chest. Phil elaborated, “I dated people with tattoos because that’s who I hang out with. I didn’t seek them out. I reblog photos of people with tattoos because I like the way tattoos look on me, and they are my inspiration. I’m not more attracted to people with tattoos. And again, you are the most gorgeous man I have ever seen.” Phil grabbed at the hem of Dan’s shirt, revealing a bit of skin above his jeans.

“What are you doing?” Dan asked, pushing the shirt back down.

“Just trust me,” Phil requested, and Dan released his grip on the shirt.

Once it was off, Phil trailed kisses over Dan’s shoulders, down his arms, over his chest. Between kisses he said, “I love each inch of your skin. I love each inch of it bare. And I would love every inch of it covered in ink, but there is a very huge condition on that.”

“What?” Dan whispered, lost in the feeling of Phil’s lips on his chest, filling it with a flutter opposite to what he’d felt earlier. It was a feeling a lightness, like his body was filled with helium, and he was about to float up to the ceiling.

“I will never find a tattoo beautiful on you that you get  _for me_. If you get one because _you_  want to, I will be happy. Otherwise, I love you this way. You are perfect when you are the way you want to be,” Phil said, smiling at Dan.

Dan looked away from Phil. “Well, I think I need to try seeing a therapist again,” he confessed.

Phil’s arms collapsed around Dan’s chest. “I’m proud of you.”

* * *

Two years later, Dan sits in the tattoo parlor chair. Dan has been panic attack free for nine months. Even when they come now, it’s not so scary. He thinks about the possibility of panicking less and less each day.

Phil is seated in the chair next to him. They both decided it was okay, just this once, to get tattoos for each other: 19.10.09 wrapped around their left ring fingers. 


End file.
